All the liberal clichés went off within seconds of one another
There we Londoners were on that Thursday morning going about our traditional business of being all multicultural and vibrant under Mr Livingstone. Suddenly we were innocent victims. On our Walkmans as we struggled into work, or over the radio for those of us still in bed, and from the editorials in the liberal press the following day, came explosion after explosion.
‘We must tackle the root causes of terrorism ... legitimate grievances ... Palestinian state ... end to Israeli settlements on West Bank ... bombs wholly unrepresentative of Muslims in this country ... we in the faith communities united in condemnation ... Archbishop of Canterbury ... global warming.... ’ On and on went the politicians, bishops, enlightened chief constables and liberal editorialists. Evidence soon emerged that all the clichés went off within seconds of one another. They were the work of experienced professionals trained to use them about any subject. Most of them live in this country. Many have British citizenship. They are taught never to write or say anything original. Only a few days before they had targeted Gleneagles. The ozone layer, African debt, Islam; it is all the same to them.
But we Londoners can be proud of the way we took it. They did it to us before over, among other things, Ireland. We are used to it. We went through even worse in the Blitz. We are not going to give in now to a cell of crazed liberals.
What drives them to do it? Well, there is much dispute about that. Simple hatred of the West is undoubtedly a factor. It would be foolish, however, to rule out the possibility that some of them really believe what they write or say. But they would tend to be the dupes, easily manipulated by cynical imams with religious titles such as ‘Controller of Current Affairs’ or ‘Comment Editor’. Those latter characters do not believe for one minute that a Palestinian state, or an American withdrawal from Iraq, would make any difference. They simply make a good living and enjoy a certain social status in Islington and Camden Town — out of stirring up moderation.
It is vital, however, that these terrible incidents should not provoke hatred of, and a ‘backlash’ against, the broader liber al community. Most liberals have never planted a cliché in any newspaper. They read them, but that is because there is no alternative. They can hardly be expected to read the Tory press. Still, one must admit, that the first time I went on the Tube after all those editorials and pronouncements on the Today programme, I harboured unworthy suspicions. Any one of my fellow passengers could be a liberal. He or she could be travelling to a newspaper office or a BBC studio to set off another piety.
Take that man sitting opposite. He is wearing an earring, and a summery floral T-shirt, and is flicking through Gay News. He could easily be a liberal bishop. But that is stereotyping on my part. He could just as easily not be. He might be a modernising Tory. But my first suspicions about him were exactly what the perpetrators of moderation wanted me to harbour. They wish to divide us, to make us suspicious of one another.
We must resist this. We cannot give in to the godfathers of moderation. Then they will have won. We must address the causes of liberalism; the inability of so many graduates to find work other than in the festering enclaves of the BBC and the comment sections. It will not be easy. But it is the only way forward. Above all, we must not resort to clichés ourselves.
It is good to see, at the top of the non-fiction bestsellers, as proof that not all is dumbed-down, the first great political biography of the 21st century: Mao, by Jung Chang and her husband Jon Halliday. One of the book’s many qualities is that it confirms what many of us have always believed about the 20th century’s ideological mass murderers: that their crimes were not simply committed in order to further their ide ology or their beliefs but were, like all mass murder, the product of character. Ages before our own had no difficulty in deciding what it was about their characters that caused their crimes: they were evil.
But the 20th century did not believe in the existence of evil. It believed in ‘psychology’ as an explanation for, say, a Hitler. That, and ‘economic structures’. Hitler came to power and did what he did because he was a tool of monopoly capitalism. When Stalin died, the Left accepted that Stalin was a mass murderer, though it had not done so in his lifetime, but ascribed it to ‘state capitalism’. Mao, in his lifetime, got off lightly from the Left because he continued to make radical noises to the end.
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, however, show that, as he rose in the Communist party in the 1920s, Mao ‘discovered in himself a love of bloodthirsty thuggery. This gut enjoyment, which verged on sadism, meshed with, but preceded, his affinity for Leninist violence. Mao did not come to violence via theory. The propensity sprang from his character ... this propensity caught Moscow’s eye, as it fitted into the Soviet model of a social revolution.’ How different from what was widely written when Mao died in 1976. ‘The death of Mao Tse-tung removes one of the most remarkable characters in history,’ said the Guardian then. ‘By his ideas and actions the most populous country in the world was translated from near-feudalism into a modern centralised state. His career is assessed by Jerome Cohen, professor of Chinese history at York University, Ontario, and John Gittings [the Guardian’s then China expert].’ The rest of the article contained no mention of the numbers killed in this translation from feudalism into a modern centralised state. The murderous ‘Cultural Revolution’ had happened only a few years before. Yet here it was depicted as a mere ‘struggle of ideas’, with Mao and his followers among ‘China’s youth’ seeking ‘to create new socialist values’. The article reassured the readers of 1976: ‘Even the disorders which Mao deliberately stirred up may turn out to be beneficial.’ Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have ensured that no one would dare write that kind of thing about Mao again, though they no doubt will about the next left-wing mass murderer.
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